Too Many Jobs

I have a pretty successful mining/manufacturing city, with about 2 coal/2 ore mines, and 4 factories producing metal and alloy. My population is sitting around 115k (~10k low wealth workers) but I have like 16k low wealth jobs. I'd like to expand some of the city services/manufacturing but they have trouble finding workers. I've tried to cut as much fat as possible but changing blocks of industry into residential only reduced the jobs needed by about 1000 and is adding a negligible amount of workers to the workforce.

It's a fundamental problem with the Glassbox engine. The engine is programmed to simulate Sims after a certain population point. These simulated Sims demand jobs, but they don't themselves work. This leaves you with either a bunch of Sims complaining about a lack of jobs or a bunch of jobs left unfilled.

So I guess I'm just wasting energy trying to be efficient with space and density since it ends up creating a city too large for the system to handle...?

Not necessarily, but the RCI balance and the real problems caused by "phantom Sims" can wreck a city. Not all of the problems in this game have actual, working solutions. But some of the problems can be circumvented by building a city in an unintuitive manner (one long, snaking road with no intersections, for example, can alleviate some of the problems caused by the poorly programmed traffic AI).

I'm slowly getting better with road layouts. I haven't tried any of the silly/obscure layouts that I've read about, though. I typically just use a 'bloodstream' layout... avenues are arteries, high density roads are the capillaries (sp!?), emphasis on T-Junctions. With ~100k, the traffic issues are minimal, just some congestion around rush hour or so.

The big frustration for me is just having a few high density commercial/industrial buildings eating up the majority of my working population. Just one high density industrial mill requires ~1000 low density workers! By reducing the number of buildings, I end up increasing Sim drive time to find a job/shop, which causes other issues. Argh, so frustrating.

Honestly I wouldn't worry about not having enough people for jobs. Just try to get it close.

It's a bigger problem if you have more people that jobs because that can actually cause issues: homeless, population decrease, etc. but all that happens if you have job openings is that jobs will shut down periodically but then a new one restarts for no penalty(other than maybe a small hit in industrial happiness).

Actually there is one bad thing that can happen from open jobs. Other regions might flood your streets at the day's start with people trying to drive into those jobs causing gridlock. Also there is apparently a bug where if 800 people for example come from a second region but don't get to the open jobs in time then the second region will send another wave of them the next time. So if you get gridlocked it may only get worse because of an infinite wave of people spamming from other regions.---The last time a Tiger took a beating this bad his wife had a 5 iron.Roll Tide

Okay, different question but wanted to respond to my own thread instead of starting another.

So I'm experimenting with some different city layouts and I've got commercial sprinkled in with all of my residential so that nobody should have to go very far to shop. I let this run for a while and I realize I have a giant mass of pedestrians moving around my city. I have a ton of job openings so I know it's not unemployed... I click on one of them and it says, "looking for mass transit to go shopping in another city." (Sorry, this is paraphrased slightly.) Meanwhile, all of my shops are running low on shoppers. The shops that are dying and the people running around looking for (at the moment, nonexistent) mass transit are all low wealth. I try closing and reloading the city and there's still a mass of a hundred shoppers running around trying to find mass transit to a neighboring city to go shopping.